In philosophy, ontic (from the Greekὄν, genitive ὄντος: "of that which is") is physical, real, or factual existence.

"Ontic" describes what is there, as opposed to the nature or properties of that being. To illustrate:

Roger Bacon, observing that all languages are built upon a common grammar, stated that they share a foundation of ontically anchored linguistic structures.

Martin Heidegger posited the concept of Sorge, or caring, as the fundamental concept of the intentional being, and presupposed an ontological significance that distinguishes ontological being from mere "thinghood" of an ontic being. He uses the German word "Dasein" for a being that is capable of ontology, that is, recursively comprehending properties of the very fact of its own Being. For Heidegger, "ontical" signifies concrete, specific realities, whereas "ontological" signifies deeper underlying structures of reality. Ontological objects or subjects have an ontical dimension, but they also include aspects of being like self-awareness, evolutionary vestiges, future potentialities, and networks of relationship.[1][2]

Nicolai Hartmann distinguishes among ontology, ontics, and metaphysics: (i) ontology concerns the categorical analysis of entities by means of the knowledge categories able to classify them, (ii) ontics refers to a pre-categorical and pre-objectual connection which is best expressed in the relation to transcendent acts, and (iii) metaphysics is that part of ontics or that part of ontology which concerns the residue of being that cannot be rationalized further according to categories.

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Harald Atmanspacher writes extensively about the philosophy of science, especially as it relates to Chaos theory, determinism, causation, and stochasticity. He explains that "ontic states describe all properties of a physical system exhaustively. ('Exhaustive' in this context means that an ontic state is 'precisely the way it is,' without any reference to epistemic knowledge or ignorance.)"[1]

In an earlier paper, Atmanspacher portrays the difference between an epistemic perspective of a system, and an ontic perspective:

"I differentiate the 'ontic' ('ontical' etc.) from the 'ontological'. I employ the former to refer to

whatever pertains to being generally, rather than some distinctively philosophical (or scientific) theory of it (ontology), so that in this sense, that of the ontic1, we can speak of the ontic presuppositions of a work of art, a joke or a strike as much as a theory of knowledge; and, within this rubric, to

"The ontic2 is always specified, and only identified, by its relation, as the intransitive object(s) of some or other (denumerable set of) particular transitive process(es) of enquiry. It is cognitive process-, and level-specific; whereas the ontological (like the ontic1) is not."[3]

"'ontic2' is an abstract way of denoting the object-domain of a particular scientific area, field, or inquiry. E.g.: molecules feature in the ontic2 of chemistry. He's just saying that the scientific undertaking ITSELF is not one of the objects of said, most narrowly construed, immediate object-domain. So chemistry itself is not part of the ontic2 of chemistry."